HelioVolt Re-Emerges With Improved Efficiency CIGS Solar Panels

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

When we last heard from HelioVolt in September of last year, the CIGS solar company had received $50 million from SK Innovation, South Korea's biggest refiner and a company that accounts for 10 percent of South Korea's gross domestic output. Although the stake that SK gained in HelioVolt was not divulged, it was likely considerable.

According to Scott Sandell, a general partner with HelioVolt VC investor New Enterprise Associates, the company's investors decided that "we really needed to find a partner that could bring a lot more capital to bear." MJ Shiao, GTM Research Solar Analyst, notes the recent trend of well-capitalized Asian companies investing heavily into thin-film solar, especially in CIGS -- a trend that has included the likes of Hanergy acquiring Solibro and investments from Hyundai, TFG Radiant, TSMC, LG and many others.

After a long quiet period, HelioVolt has emerged with an announcement of 13.5 percent efficiency solar panels, manufactured in HelioVolt's Austin, Texas factory. The efficiency levels of 13.5 percent, if consistently manufacturable in volume in a fully utilized factory, along with actual customers, places HelioVolt's CIGS efficiency amongst the efficiency leaders in that materials system along with MiaSolé.

Those remain big "ifs."

Eleven years since its founding and about $200 million in venture and strategic funding later, HelioVolt has shipped no commercial product of consequence.

Here are shipment figures for CIGS vendors in 2011, according to GTM Research: